You are here

Facility

NPR Labs is housed at NPR’s Headquarters building in Washington, DC. In addition to our offices, we have an RF Lab and a critical listening environment for perceptual testing.

The RF Lab is equipped to fully simulate and experiment with analog and HD radio modulated signals following current broadcast practice, or looking forward to new techniques. We possess redundant broadcast equipment from several of the industry’s leading manufacturers. With RDS and SCA generators, NPR Labs can test the impact to or from additional energy in the analog FM band. Our Hewlett Packard channel simulator gives us the unique ability to create multipath fading conditions in the controlled laboratory environment, while our HP audio analyzer gives us precise noise and distortion measurements of any receiver tested in our shielded test enclosure. GPIB, TCP/IP, and serial port connections allow test beds to be fully automated to aid in the collection and storage or large amounts of data.